Jerome Sala on
Poetry. Pop Culture. Everyday Life.

June 2012

06/18/2012

In the latest issue of Conjunctions, I came across a poem, titled simply "Cat", by Martine Bellen, which intrigued and delighted me. Here's the first stanza:

CAT

The cat belongs toMe. The cat belongsTo the house. The cat belongs toThe other cat. The catBelongs to itself. The catBelongs to the forest. TheCat belongs to the bird and mouse.The cat belongs to the mountain lion.The cat belongs to no one. The catBelongs to nothing. The cat belongsTo everyone, everything.

In simple, quick sentences (that made me think of a reading primer), this poem takes off on a quest to define and understand what the cat is by exploring the network of objects, beings and meanings associated with it.

But whether the words come from "the domestic" or "the wilds", they can't quite catch the cat. It's all and none of the above. The next stanza elaborates on this mysterious being and the words it's been given to live in:

The cat has a nameThat I gave it. Everyone knows the cat's nameIs not its name. It is my name for the cat.Sometimes the cat refuses to acknowledgeThis name and sometimes the catPlays along with the life I've created for the cat.Sometimes the cat pretends that it doesn't live in a realmDifferent from the one that the cat and ILive in together. The cat has needs that must be metFor the cat to live in my house, though most of the cat's timeIs spent elsewhere. I invite the cat to live with meSo I can perceive some of the "elsewhere"In which the cat spends much cat time.The cat shares what I can't see by maintainingAn existence in my house and by responding toThe name I gave the cat.

The wit here, of course, is found in the way the cat gets to turn the tables on its supposed owner. It plays with her just as she plays with it -- pretending at times to act like a cat should, according to human conceptions and desires. But you also get the sense that this creature is doing a little shucking and jiving.

As such, it's a relative of Montaigne's famous cat, of whom the Renaissance-era skeptic asked, "When I am playing with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me?"

I gather that Montaigne meant to throw doubt on the presumption that "man", with his weapons of Reason and Language, was a sort of god over "ignorant" nature. He believed instead that animals had languages and reasons of their own -- ones that we just couldn't understand.

As it turns out, he was closer to the truth than the "cutting edge" rationalists of his day. According to current science, animals not only have languages, but they get high (and addicted!), depressed, and can become obsessed with their own grooming.

Maybe that's why this poem also made me think of the web's love of cat humor. Isn't what's funny about some of it (as in the pix at left) the fact that it makes humans seem pompous in their assumptions of superior intelligence over the animal kingdom?

In any case, the last stanza of Bellen's poem opened up another dimension of meaning for me -- so that I read it as much as a comment about language as animals.

I know there will be a momentIn the circuitry of space-time in which the cat will discardThe name and forsake my house for goodAnd will exist only in the fieldsI cannot see without the cat living in my house. On that day,I might say, "The cat has moved full time into the wild."Or I might say, "Miau-miau has run away."

What strikes me about the final two lines is that both are descriptions from different (say less and more personal) human perspectives (just as earlier we got a picture of life with "owner" and "cat" from their respective positions). Yet, no matter how many ways the poem looks at the cat, in the end, it escapes back into the "wilds" beyond words.

I wonder, then, if just as Montaigne's quip questioned the pretensions of his day, whether you could read this poem as a rejoinder to some of the cliches of our own.